Systems engineer Yacine jokes about dense academic papers, prompting Chris Paxton to pitch the RoboPapers podcast
Story Overview
A systems engineer’s meme about wrestling with dense robotics papers drew a direct reply from researcher Chris Paxton, who pointed to the RoboPapers podcast he co-hosts as a way to hear authors walk through the same work in plain conversation.
Episodes focus on concrete research threads
Weekly talks cover topics like vision-language models for manipulation and sim-to-real reinforcement learning, letting listeners follow the authors’ reasoning without needing to parse the original text themselves.
Reach and details stay limited so far
The show appears on standard podcast platforms with no reported listener numbers or funding figures, leaving open how widely it has landed with builders outside the initial X thread.
Many users voiced frustration with robotics research papers, calling them cult-like, largely faked, full of filler, and misleading about results due to publish-or-perish pressures.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
Most Activity
@yacineMTB This is why we have a podcast @RoboPapers
Me any time I read robotics research papers
@yacineMTB Reading papers with your own eyes? Don't you have clankers for that?
@yacineMTB me reading chinese robotics research papers
@yacineMTB bro hank green blocked me because I replied to someone saying they are what's wrong with the world
@yacineMTB it's pretty bad out there
@yacineMTB Now make the YT video where you say the same thing 😆
@yacineMTB 8 pages of filler to say something that could be a table and two sentences
@yacineMTB They're boring. We need brainrot editions.
@yacineMTB "we made a model that fails on 19/20 tasks but it's sota on 1/20 task!! Yayy paper!!
@yacineMTB papers are written by undergrads and other students btw
@yacineMTB Then you aren't reading the good papers, lots of so called scientific papers are just slop
@yacineMTB They do a whole bunch of nothing
Companies making meaningful change keep their stuff unpublished
@yacineMTB robotics research papers are largely faked, total potempkin village of results, and it's dead common for the whole field
@wavefnx @yacineMTB So far, they are much easier.
@yacineMTB Me after finding out about “research paper mill”
@yacineMTB We gotta change the paradigm.
On an honest note, with your reach, and my axe, we could potentially make a change. make your own place where people can submit and review papers, make your own Yacine Approved stamp of approval according to our standards, not academia. Seriously.
@yacineMTB me when I read a “categorification” of ML paper where the first 20 pages are a heavily diluted summary of CWM where attention is a monad and gradient descent is a natural transformation
@yacineMTB All papers lie. It takes skill to find the ones that lie least.
@yacineMTB When I was a teenager I liked the larp of the aesthetic weeding through papers but I think if there's a youtube video/codebase/article explaining the concept that usually is better, unless you're doing something truly novel that the lit is too niche
@yacineMTB Publish or perish
Has done almost irreplaceable harm to research